Ben Hur the novel, pt. 4

So Lew Wallace, chapter 6 of a work that is Victorian Protestant but pretends to write about Jews. Now he gives us a mythical date calculation. It has to accommodate Christian pretense that Jesus was born December 25, the holy day of Sol Invictus, Constantine’s personal god, who was still worshipped after Constantine made his deathbed conversion. But nobody knows what year to use and so it’s impossible to calculate the Jewish calendar date.

Because the Jewish calendar is lunar with intercalation. The fixed point is that the night after the Passover Seder, the first ripe wheat had to be harvested. One month before that is Purim, which moves so that it doesn’t conflict with Shabbat. But if calculations show that Purim will come too early, the calendar intercalates. It sticks in another full month; that is when Purim happens.

Rome was on the Julian calendar at the time. Rome never intercalated. When Caesar took over, he found that the consuls had screwed with the lunar calendar for political reasons. He changed to a solar calendar with a leap day. The priests screwed that up, and Augustus had to re-adjust. But even that was inaccurate and 15 centuries later the Gregorian calendar had to be invented.

So we can’t figure this out via the Roman calendar and Wallace bringing it up is useless.

Second, Wallace screws up the timing of the day. The Jewish calendar begins a new day at sunset, not at dawn. The Joppa gates would be open to let the farmers bring in produce and animals for sale, not because it was a new day.

And the farmers had to go home at evening because fuel was expensive. The usual lamp that you would have in a house would blow out in the wind of your passage if you tried to use it to light your road. Also, the town council would go to synagogue for evening prayers, and then home for supper. If you had a business dispute, you wouldn’t be able to call a court to settle it. So as dusk fell, the farmers would pack up the leftovers and take them home to their wives. The gates would close, a new day would begin at sunset, and the city would be relatively quiet for the night.